I really needed the mountains. The crisp icy air. That spiritual rejuvenation.
I escaped into the highlands to commune with the divine & now I've returned to my dense, concrete jungle home where I yearn to run away into isolation & solitude yet again.

Well, I can't. I've got my confounded Core Selection to fret over. So I'll just content myself with listening to Angus & Julia Stone and dream of green fields & freedom.


Malaysia's scenery is breathtaking. More on Flickr (click)!

I've still to upload the gakkenflex shots but I'm really tired now. Sleeps... ....

10 years ago, I made a pilgrimage to what I thought was my last church camp. Surprise, 10 years older - I'm going there again. Hello 10 hour bus-ride.

Have you ever explored the Mandarin Gallery?
Its facade of polished marble walls & sky-high glass ceilings screams at all cash-strapped students to give it wide berth.

Not if you're a coupon wielding student, of course. Brandishing a 51% off special meal ticket - my friends & I meekly went exploring this giant cavern of marble opulence - right into a cafe called Arteastiq.

An immaculate lounge room with set designs so sharp you could cut yourself on it. The cafe itself oozes aristocratic charm, it's delightful ambience marred only by the unreasonably low tea table.

Arteastiq is known for its home-brewed tea.
Our tea arrived on a wooden tray with dainty glassware containing honey or sugar cubes to sweeten your tea, if you so wish, & a side of biscuits.

I got a Viva la Fiesta La something something Tortilla. It was about ten words long & sounded more foreign than an ang moh speaking Singlish. You know what? Next time if I ever open a posh restaurant, I'll call the plain fish & chips Aqua Animalia de la Tuberosum Plantae & sell it for $19.

Anyway, it was duck wrapped in tortilla. And it was delicious. But slightly tiny.
The side of salad came in a tiny glass cup. And, get this, no cutlery.
The only thing on the plate that came close to being a fork was the toothpick stuck into my tortilla. Let me tell you, eating a salad with a toothpick will guarantee you loose more weight than you consume.

The food was good & the tea was superb. MMMmmm.
But the normal price for this is $33 and the discout made it $17. In fact, the tea itself on a normal day would cost $12 a pot. Ouch. Arteastiq is THE place for tai tais & guys who want to impress their girlfriends (it sure impressed the heck outta me).
It's really good but very, very over-priced.
Hello $1.20 teh beng!

That's my printed rain drop dress, yes, in acrylic.

I've been assured that fabric paint & acrylic are very much interchangable & the latter is widely used to paint clothes. So there.

I initially wanted to carve out fancy swirls on my rubber stamps & spotted this 'wood-carving' tool set in Daiso that reportedly carves rubber too. LIES! This useless duo carves wood and rubber like a broken toothpick. Don't be cheap & buy yourself a proper rubber carving set from Popular at $7+.

I settled with hacking the lino pad with a blunt scissors & a sharp penknife.

To make the handle of the rubber stamp, cut off sections of a used eraser & primitively stick them on the back of the stamp with UHU glue. I used that iconic blue & white eraser that comes with our secondary school Oxford Mathematical instrument set. Damn! That eraser is hard as heck. How did anyone erase anything with that without ripping holes in their graph paper amazes me.

Mix the desired colours & thin it out with water. Don't apply too thick a coat or the pattern will peel. Stamping gives a 'watery' speckled look that I absolutely love love love to bits!
Leave the paint to dry completely overnight & iron it a bit. Voila!

There is something immortally sad, sir;
of being intoxicated with the ocean.

What does this have to do with a watery owl & his carrot?
NOTHING!
But it is the beginning of what I'm going to do this holiday. Paint! I'm going to paint my life away! Robots and silly animals - I'll paint only things that make me happy.

I'll print rain-drop patterns on my dress and sew myself a new cardigan. Then I'll take my beloved plastic cameras & run all over Singapore taking artistic 'blurry' photos and spend a fortune developing them, no doubt.

Then I'm gonna fly to the moon with my jet-propelled butt and paint it bright garish yellow all over with a big smiley face & a dash of crimson at the corner so that back on earth, it'll look like the Comedian's badge from the Watchmen. Then I'll fly back home & watch Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy non-stop while eating chendol & hokkien mee - at the same time.

Oh, that invincible feeling you get when the holidays start.

I was listening to a friend mention how blogs are a thing of the past.
No one reads long boring posts about people's life anymore.
No one is interested in your online diary of painfully dreary events.
Razor fast Twitter & Facebook status updates are the Now - goodbye ole' blogs, you're just a platform for pretty pictures & the occasional sarcastic rantings.

I agree with her. It's true.

No one wants to type out whole sentences anymore, worrying about how the prose sounds and whether your grammar is spot on. It's damn tiring trying to think of how to open a blog post, how to structure the body & how to end it without sounding like a total blithering cretin.
It's so much easier to chuck out a "HOT LIKE HELL 2DAY, LOL :(" on Twitter than to cough out a "That merciless ball of flaming killer sambal star called the sun decided to kill all human beings on the earth today by ruthless ... ..." etc. etc. Needless verbiage.

Perhaps that's why I never caught up to the Twitter and Facebook rapid-fire status updates about your personal life. I'm a dead old fashion literary antique.

I can't appreciate reading words grabbed out from thin air with nary any background story whatsover, strung together on barely-there grammar & spelling & blared into your face like the climax of an Avery cartoon.

That's why I still love reading well-written blog posts. I'd rather read beautiful verbiage than ugly, character-limited remarks that add no value whatsoever to my life.
*Abrupt post end*

obligatory pretty pics from here.

Let's be free fools for a moment.
I'll put on my magic sneakers
& run into the clouds up there.

I won't fall down because I'm a god;
That foolish god with magic sneakers.

☆